1994 Ad

IT WAS pleasing in the days following the Republican sweep last month to watch the disorientation of the Left. I like to think that the pleasure I took was something more than cheap Schadenfreude--that it was, instead, a principled and mature response on my part to the magisterial movement of ideas through history, akin to the pleasure one takes in watching a garden bloom, or a mother nurture her young. Actually it was cheap Schadenfreude. I liked to watch them squirm. I liked the little beads of sweat that formed on Vic Fazio's upper lip during his TV interviews. I liked the President's rambling, groping press conference. I liked the way Tom Foley's head swung from side to side, like Charlie McCarthy's, as he conceded defeat. I liked it.

I particularly liked--no, loved--Arthur Schlesinger's essay in the Wall Street Journal, which appeared with admirable promptness a week after the election. Professor Schlesinger has apparently concluded that his greatest contribution to his discipline, aside from a gossamer prose style, a brilliant gift for narrative, and weird bow ties, is his "cyclical" theory of recent American political history. The cycles last for thirty years, goes the theory, with the Right and Left dominating by turns. Thus Bill Clinton's inauguration kicked off a new period of liberal activism, after the Franco-like Presidency of George Bush. Goes the theory.

Now, of course, the theory is in trouble, which spells the loss to the Left of one of its great conceptual consolations. Professor Schlesinger labors mightily, not to say pathetically, to resuscitate his theory and restore its predictive power. Cycles, he told Journal readers, "not seldom" possess an "undertow." During this undertow, which Professor Schlesinger had failed to tell us about until now, programs are "haltered," government is made a "scapegoat," anger is "free-floating," parties are "dealigned," and "bogeymen loosen purses." This is some undertow! To judge by his essay, the cross-pollination of metaphors is disastrous for the professor's prose style and narrative gift. Thank God he's still got the bow ties.

Professor Schlesinger's piece merely whetted my appetite for what has become one of the great pleasures of life, my weekly devouring of The Nation magazine. Schlesinger is a high priest of the mushy Left, but The Nation of course offers up the strong undiluted brew. (Artie! Get these metaphors away from me!) I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that The Nation's contributors--left-wing ideologues to a human person--showed a far more sophisticated grasp of what happened in November; for ideologues, as you'd expect, take ideas seriously. They paid the electorate the kind compliment of assuming it knew what it was doing, and then they rendered the less friendly, but logically unavoidable, judgment that the electorate was therefore swine.

I disagree with this line of reasoning but admire its integrity. And I think I know where it will lead: soon enough you will hear from the Left sly denigrations of representative government itself. Right-wing wackos have already arrived at this position, and I'm sure they will welcome their fellow nutjobs with open arms.

For the last word in cluelessness, though, we must look beyond the mushy Left, beyond the hard Left, to the Left that dare not speak its name--the "mainstream" liberals of America's working press. Shortly after the election I happened to be at one site of daily news gathering in Washington. The air was thick with gloom and epithets from the objective reporters. Intolerance. Christian Right. Extreme. Radical. And my favorite: Scary. The same day a liberal acquaintance of mine ran into a highly regarded editor. "I can say that for the first time in my life I'm truly scared," the editor said. And what, wondered my acquaintance, had scared him so? "Just think what Newt Gingrich can do to this country now," the editor replied.

IN A HAPPY coincidence the June number of the American Journalism Review landed on my desk a few days after the election. Its cover story profiled "Washington's new bureau chiefs," who "are younger, more irreverent," brash, ironic, fearless, skeptical, and did I mention irreverent? They are "empowered by their generational ardor."

"The people covering Washington," one editor told AJR, "tend to not be the around-the-clock, hard-drinking, schmoozing, insider, good-old-boy journalist that you could still see a few years ago." This is undoubtedly true. The irony--if I may use the term--is that those good-old-boy museum pieces were far better acquainted with the real world, as experienced by most Americans, than the baby-boomers who have replaced them.

This is an irony, needless to say, that our knowing young newsroom ironists tend not to comprehend. The alienation that has always suffused the American Left is second nature to today's editors and reporters. As you see, they call it irreverence or skepticism, and it will be honed to a dagger's point as they consider their scary new adversaries. The great show in American politics in the coming years won't be between Democrats and Republicans but between Republicans and the "mainstream" press, hostile, angry, uncomprehending. And it is a show--another irony!--that they won't be able to cover, because they themselves are the story. Which leads us to our final (I promise) irony: In the cycle of American history even now unwinding, the irreverent will soon become the irrelevant.

COPYRIGHT 1994 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group